John Egerton is an independent journalist and nonfiction author who lives in Nashville, Tennessee and writes broadly about his native South. Born in Atlanta in 1935 and raised in Kentucky, where he received his formal education, Egerton has also lived in Florida, Virginia and Texas. His books and articles seek connections between historical and contemporary Southern people, places and events. His aim is to discover and interpret the positive and negative forces that for centuries have given this complex region its distinctiveness. Among his books are: The Americanization of Dixie (1974), Generations (1983), Southern Food (1987), and Speak Now Against the Day (1994), for which he received the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award.